Speed Awareness Course - Part 2

The course was scheduled for four and a half hours in Aylesford Rugby Club.

Gratuitous shot of rugby players from Aylesford Rugby Club:

Anyway it's not quite the venue I imagined for a Speed Awareness Course but the venue was as unexpected as the offender list.  Speeders, it seems, are young, old, very old, male, female, white collar, blue collar, unemployed.

So what does a Speed Awareness Course cover?  Well I think that depends on the course provider and the area that the course is in.  So anything you read here applies to rugby clubs in Kent.

The first thing we did was write our names on the tent cards on our table.  The joker on our table wrote his name as "Speedy".  How we laughed.

The second thing we did was a bit of an ice breaker.  In groups we had to identify some road signs.  This served to highlight the general ignorance in the room.  I didn't find my own ignorance too surprising as the Highway Code is a book I haven't opened for a lot of years, and actually I knew more than the rest of my group, but still not enough.

There then followed a similar exercise in which we had to identify the speed limit for different roads without the aid of visual stimulus.  I got into a bit of an argument then because the instructor told us that Transit vans weren't one tonne vans.  I said they were available as one and two tonne vans.  I almost started to go into wheelbase and drive options but realised I was there to learn.  (She was wrong, I think).

The rest of the course is a bit of a blur.  I sort of started to lose interest when they stopped testing us.  We were forced to watch one of those hideous adverts promoting the message "Think! Kill your speed."  There then followed extended over-analysis of the video and some pseudo role play in which we assumed the role of the characters in the film.  I mean I love am dram and did Drama 'O' Level but in a room of adults that don't want to know one another and who only have "being naughty" in common, it's just inappropriate.

I think we were treated to some road casualty stats that I already knew and then we did some defensive driver classroom training which isn't a patch on defensive driver training in a car.

Did I mention I walked out with a new copy of the Highway Code and a pen.  I didn't steal these, they were being given away.  I'm not a criminal.